A First Look at Design Miami’s 2015 Entry Pavilion

A rendering of this year's entry pavilion at Design Miami.

By John Gendall

Sept. 14, 2015

As designers know all too well, for every finished project — what gets walked down a runway or stocked on a shelf — there are dozens, if not hundreds, of unrealized ideas that never make it out of the studio. This work, often frustrating and messy, is so central to the design process, yet so often goes unseen — until this December, when it will be presented front and center at Design Miami’s entry pavilion.

Each year, Design Miami commissions an early-career architect to design the entry pavilion for its site. And for 2015, the fair’s organizers awarded the project to the most fledgling designers possible: a group of students — Joanne Cheung, Jenny Shen, Steven Meyer, Doug Harsevoort and Yiliu Shen-Burke — at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). Together, they have designed UNBUILT, a kind of fragmented canopy made with 200 unique, pink-foam architectural models — the kind architecture students agonize over in studio — perched atop a metal grid structure. But don’t expect to recognize the models as you walk in; until now, the buildings they represent have existed only in the imaginations of their designers.

“It captures something that is so often unseen,” explains Design Miami’s executive director Rodman Primack. “Most people never work with architects or see how things get designed, so this exposes the inner struggle of getting to something that finally gets made.” The pavilion’s student designers will cull the models from the GSD community, including alumni, faculty and fellow students. And an app will provide information about each model to fair visitors.

For the school’s part, the pavilion represents a new way of understanding unbuilt work — not, as it so often can be, as time lost on a project that just never took off, but rather, as a productive process and an end unto itself. As the GSD dean, Mohsen Mostafavi, says, “The aspiration of the unbuilt is an important thing, a vehicle to the future of design.”